Time transcripts of getting
[00:00:00.00] Ok so I'm maybe 15, maybe 16 at the time of the story
[00:00:08.55] and I'm living out in Glendale Heights, Illinois,
[00:00:12.80] and Crane's Chicago Business once described it as
[00:00:14.90] a hardscrabble factory town, but it wasn't.
[00:00:19.10] It was a bedroom community, kinda working class I guess, yeah.
[00:00:26.00] Certainly my parents were, certainly I am,
[00:00:28.16] I consider myself that way anyway.
[00:00:32.20] And I'm walking down the street, all of a sudden this car goes screeching past me.
[00:00:39.70] And then as in lots of small towns I guess, you kind of drive around.
[00:00:48.65] You drive around a lot, go back and forth here and there.
[00:00:54.10] anyway, there were maybe 8, 9, maybe 10 kids,
[00:00:58.90] crammed, all guys, into this car.
[00:01:03.00] It made me kind of think of one of those cars in the circus with all the clowns.
[00:01:07.65] Well I laughed, and when I laughed,
[00:01:12.62] they got kind of upset on one of their passes.
[00:01:15.20] And so they zoomed around again just so they could yell:
[00:01:18.50] "Faggot! Fag!" "Queer!"
[00:01:22.40] Now, at the time I hadn't really dealt with the fact that I was gay,
[00:01:28.85] I kinda sorta was wondering it, and I knew I was kinda intrigued, and interested in men.
[00:01:34.94] But I didn't really know what to do about it, or even if I wanted to do anything about it.
[00:01:42.85] So, so I was kind of appalled, like, "How did they know?"
[00:01:49.14] "How do they know? I haven't said anything about this to anybody? How do they know?"
[00:01:53.19] But then the other thing is that I,
[00:01:57.24] kinda was feeling pretty liberated.
[00:02:01.30] Because I had been worried, this is 1975,
[00:02:05.37] there wasn't any Will and Grace, you know.
[00:02:07.40] There weren't a whole lot of media role models for young gay guys,
[00:02:12.10] and I didn't know anybody who was gay, and I was worried that I was the only one.
[00:02:16.66] And the minute that they called me those names,
[00:02:23.10] I started to think "Oh my God, I'm not the only one."
[00:02:29.80] "There are people out here, there are people like me."
[00:02:32.84] And that was totally cool, that was in fact liberating.
[00:02:40.30] And so I kinda started trying to figure out where I could run into guys,
[00:02:44.16] and I kinda figured out where I could run into guys.
[00:02:47.40] And one thing led to another and it was all pretty fun.
[00:02:54.36] Well years later, years and years later.
[00:02:58.48] I think it was maybe even in one of my courses,
[00:03:00.99] at the University of North Chicago, where I did my MA and my PHD.
[00:03:07.99] So maybe it was Bill Cavino, or maybe it was David (...).
[00:03:10.87] And anyway we got onto the subject of naming and what people are called
[00:03:15.99] and the implications for naming, as an act of rhetoric.
[00:03:23.18] And I thought back to that story, at that moment,
[00:03:26.20] and I connected to that story right then.
[00:03:31.23] And I realized that that was the first act that I consider myself as a Rhetorician,
[00:03:40.44] because it's the first time that I thought of that language in that way.
[00:03:46.10] Not as something solid, where this word means that word,
[00:03:50.15] but I had actually thought about what the language means and how it operates.
[00:03:55.66] And what it's implications were. And if there were names for these things,
[00:03:59.50] then there must be things connected to these things, to these concepts.
[00:04:05.55] And so that's it, the more I... The older I get, you know,
[00:04:11.61] the more I think that it's naming, and language that makes us who we are.
[00:04:18.22] I mean, you know, there's an old Biblical story,
[00:04:22.70] that one of Adam's gifts and tasks and duties,
[00:04:27.08] was to name everything that hadn't yet had a name.
[00:04:31.60] It came straight out of God's mind into being,
[00:04:34.15] and now it needed to be called something, and that was Adam's job.
[00:04:39.96] So you know, we've been called The Human, one of the definitions
[00:04:44.08] is the Man who Laughs, another is the Man who Plays,
[00:04:47.40] another is Homosapiens, The Wise Ones, all those names.
[00:04:52.31] Some sexist, some not. For me it's those who name.
[00:04:57.70] That's really what we do. And that's what we do as artists,
[00:05:04.51] that's what we do in our lives, with metaphor.
[00:05:08.55] So, so I think we are the ones who name.
[00:05:12.99] Thanks.
[00:05:16.92]